A far western Kentucky state House district will have a new representative in Frankfort in January for the first time since 2012.
Graves County resident Kimberly Holloway unseated longtime incumbent Republican State Rep. Richard Heath in the District 2 GOP primary on Tuesday. No Democratic challengers registered to run in the general election for District 2, which encompasses all of Graves County and part of McCracken County.
Holloway’s victory comes after she ran a write-in campaign against Heath in the 2022 general election – which she ran after being disqualified from the 2022 GOP primary over a paperwork error.
“I am ready for this challenge and am so thankful to have been given this opportunity. I owe my most sincere gratitude to my fellow Kentuckians for trusting me to be an advocate for our district,” Holloway said in a social media post.
At a GOP candidate forum in Graves County last month, Holloway said it was time for a “changing of the guard” for District 2. There, she also criticized Heath for his support of a 2022 act that reduced the state’s income tax, but also levied a sales tax on services like utilities for locations excluding primary residences. She argued that the Commonwealth needed to enact a “fair income tax elimination plan” that leaves more money in taxpayers’ pockets.
KY Liberty Caucus listed Holloway as a verified candidate – indicating that candidates’ views and actions “closely align with a principled, constitutional conservative, liberty-minded worldview.”
Heath, the incumbent, was first elected to the office in 2012. He has served as the chair of the House Agriculture Committee since 2017.
In another contested GOP primary race in western Kentucky, incumbent State Sen. Jason Howell held off a challenge in District 1 from former state Rep. Lynn Bechler. With no Democratic challenger in the November general election, Howell will represent the district for another four years.
Howell won his first term in office in 2020 and has said that he wants to continue to build on the work he’s done at the Capitol. One of the focus areas for his next term he named during his campaign was rural economic development.
“I think we do a really good job in the state of developing economic prospects inside the Golden Triangle. But I think we kind of fall apart outside of that,” he said. “That's something that I’ve built a coalition of rural legislators with over the last couple of years, and we're going to start looking more and more into that area.”
Howell said he also wanted to work toward a goal of bringing a veterinary school program to Murray State University.
